if helplessly in love:

I’m sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.
-Richard Siken, Little Beast

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.
—Marilyn Hacker, Nearly a Valediction

I love you. If you hadn’t existed I would have had to invent you.
–Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

And I’d choose you; in a hundred different lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.
—Kiersten White

They amputated your thighs off my hips. As far as I’m concerned they are all surgeons. All of them. They dismantled us each from the other. As far as I’m concerned they are all engineers. All of them. A pity. We were such a good and loving invention. An airplane made from a man and wife. Wings and everything. We hovered a little above the earth. We even flew a little.
-Yehuda Amichai, A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention.

if in the throes of longing:

Le seul vrai langage au monde est un baiser.
-Musset

When I haven’t been kissed in a long time, I create civil disturbances, then insult the cops who show up, till one of them grabs me by the collar and hurls me up against the squad car, so I can remember, at least for a moment, what it’s like to be touched.
—Jeffrey McDaniel, When a Man Hasn’t Been Kissed

Tattoo my lips with permanent kisses.
-Michael Faudet

if in contemplation of the past:

I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.
-Arthur Miller, The Crucible

You fell in love with my flowers but not with my roots, so when Autumn arrived you didn’t know what to do.
-lifeisthefight.tumblr.com

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
-W.H. Auden, Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

if in trouble with oneself:

You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.
-Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.
-Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.
-Margaret Atwood

I spent my life learning to feel less.
-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.
-H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

I belong deeply to myself.
—Warsan Shire, 34 Excuses for Why We Failed at Love

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.
-William Shakespeare, Henry V

And God said “Love Your Enemy,” and I obeyed him and loved myself.
-Kahlil Gibran, The Broken Wings

What if I told you I’m incapable of tolerating my own heart?”
-Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
-Sylvia Plath

if looking for stories:

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
-Philip Pullman

They say a woman’s first blood doesn’t come from between her legs
but from biting her tongue.
-Meggie Royer

When a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.
-Earl Shorris